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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually against the "why is this posted on HN" comments, so can someone just clue me into why they personally find this so interesting? Is it the effort put into the calculation or the revenue angle?

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It's not super-interesting, but I do find this somewhat interesting for the insight into this industry's business model. I also think it's at least more relevant than the story of Yasuke the African Samurai, which is currently outranking this on the front page and whose only comments are "I saw this on Reddit." So I guess you take what you can get on a slow news day.

Not the OP, but from the numbers you get a view on what playing a "free to play" game to the end will cost you (600USD).

Which is about as jaw-dropping as what people spend on WoW and other pay-to-play games to get to the end game.

Incidentally, I ran the numbers on League of Legends a while back, and it was pretty close to the numbers in this article as well. I wonder if that's the magic number for these "not pay-to-win wink wink" type games.

(Even more incidentally, I am pretty sure you can get to WoW's end-game within a couple of years of playing, so $150–$300 seems like a reasonable estimate of that game's TCO.)

I'd argue that you don't need to spend $600 to play it to the end. That's just what you'd have to outlay if you wanted to own nearly everything in the game. There's plenty of top level players who've spent <$100 on the game, and have just gotten lucky with the RNG aspects or know the game mechanics so well they can force a win.

550 packs costs 55,000 gold (100 per pack). If you win 30 games a day (max) that gets you 100 gold. the daily quest gets you minimum 40 gold. That would be 393 days worst case. However, if you play arena and can 'go infinite', that is, win at least 7 games in a given arena run, and you are guaranteed to get back more gold than you put in. You also get a free pack with every run regardless, so even if you only make back 50 gold you've at least broken even, plus you'll get dust to craft cards. I believe there are streamers out there that have full collections without dropping a dime on HS. In any case, if you are that adamant about not paying for HS it's possible to achieve a full collection within a year. Personally, I am not that adamant, and have happily spent money on the game to support it.

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